I've started having even more fun with Kotlin. One way you can learn Kotlin is by practicing and solving real exercises. That's how I discovered Exercism.org, a free way to learn dozens of languages by jumping head first into problems. One of their first exercises for learning Kotlin is calculating the Hamming Distance between DNA strands.
This made me scratch my head a few times before understanding what those double-exclamation points mean in some Kotlin code references, but it seems it's not that difficult to understand. This is another post in the "Fun with Kotlin" series. Btw, I didn't explain before because I thought it's easy to spot, I chose "Fun with Kotlin" because the word fun in Kotlin is what you start the declaration of a function with and it also means having a great time. I know, a bad dad joke but I couldn't help myself.
Coding your own Android app as a newbie dev sounds extremely difficult. Sure, there are a lot of platforms out there that allow you to create your Android app without any coding knowledge, but at some point if you need anything advanced you'll still need to look at the code. That's one of the reason I've recently started having a bit of fun with Kotlin to see where that gets me. In the worst case scenario I'll simply give up on learning it after spending a bit of time doing so - but even this scenario has the benefit of training my mind (learning something new helps) and in the end I'd still know something new. The best case scenario is the one where I manage to publish a small Android app built from scratch.